E = m × γ

γ = 1 / √(1 − v²/c²)

What kills is total energy, not size. A small body moving fast carries more energy than a big one drifting, so it eats the big one. That is the whole game in one sentence.

Your hands

• Hold and drag to steer. Costs nothing.
• Flick to burn part of yourself out as light. You shrink, you rocket the other way, and the light you fired is food for whoever touches it.
• Double-tap for radar when you are lost.

Reading the field

• White dashed ring — that one can eat you. Run.
• Amber ring — you can eat that one. Hunt.
• The strip along the bottom points at everything, and the big arrow is the Crucible.
• A glowing cone off your nose means you are near the speed limit. That is when you are most dangerous and most likely to die.

The Crucible

The dark thing at the centre. It pulls on everything, it boils you away if you linger, and it kills outright at the core. It is also how you find your way home, because it is the one landmark in an empty sky.

Where it came from

Nobody built it, and nobody found it burning. It is simply the place where mass stops being mass.

Everything out here is on its way in. The dust you eat was somebody once. The light you burn to move is you, leaving. Every body that has ever crossed this field ends as radiation falling through that dark, and the field is not an arena drawn around the Crucible. It is the queue.

Which is the joke in the name. A crucible is where you melt things down, and it is also the trial that shows what somebody is made of. It is doing both to you right now, and the only way to score is to go nearer it than is sensible.

Your score

The highest energy you reached before you died. Nothing else counts, so a careful small run scores nothing and a reckless enormous one scores everything.